Elina Merenmies

ELINA MERENMIES

A SPACED OUT ADVENTURE

Elina Merenmies creates deeply disturbing pictures occupying a sphere between dream and nightmare. Her art tells odd, surrealist stories that are both unpleasant and funny. Her eclectic inspirations include horror comics and sixteenth century Flemish painting.

Baby Monster, 2002

Description
The eight watercolours each show a person cropped like a passport photo. However there is no photographic verisimilitude in these portraits: the faces are violently distorted and applied with expressive, strident colours blurring any precise physiognomic features. A few of the features are rendered in more detail and they make noticeable contrasts to the smeared expanses of colour that erase and distort the person's face.

About the works
The people in Merenmies' pictures are horrible monsters. They have lost any resemblance to the reality that supplied her inspiration. Instead the figures now have become dreamy or nightmarish impressions and moods that she brings out with expressive, blurred watercolours combined with more precise black ink lines.
Read more

Merenmies' art in general
The point of departure for Merenmies' art is the unconscious spiced with the nightmares and surrealist stories we encounter on a daily basis in the movies, TV and comics.
Read more

Literature
"Stop for A Moment. Painting as Presence", NIFCA, Helsinki, 2002
"Stop for A Moment. Painting as Narrative", NIFCA, Helsinki, 2002
"Ur flickors liv", Amos Andersons Konstmuseum, Helsinki, 2003